Mugabe's decree on prices puts Zimbabwe economy in a tailspin
Mugabe has come up with a brilliant new plan to counter the hyper-inflation that is wrecking the Zimbabwe economy. He has ordered all shops to slash their prices in half. Why didn't anyone think of this earlier? Why have economists made economics seem so complicated when a genius like Mugabe can come up with something so harebrained?
The result?
Of course, the difference this will make to Zimbabwe's poorest citizens is almost nil as they have long given up on money and rely on food which they can grow in order to survive. Now the people feeling the pinch are the businessmen and Zimbabwe's more affluent citizens.One month after Mugabe decreed just that, commanding merchants nationwide to counter 10,000-percent-a-year hyperinflation by slashing prices by half and more, Zimbabwe's economy is at a halt.
Essentials like bread, sugar and cornmeal, staples of every Zimbabwean's diet, have vanished, seized by mobs of bargain-hunters who denuded stores like locusts in wheat fields. Meat is nonexistent. Gasoline is nearly unobtainable. Hospital patients are dying for lack of basic medical supplies. Power blackouts and water cutoffs are endemic.
Manufacturing has slowed to a crawl, because few businesses can produce goods for less than their government-imposed sale prices. Raw materials are drying up because suppliers are being forced to sell to factories at a loss. Businesses are laying off workers or reducing their hours.
"The last seven years, I haven't panicked at all. I always figured that where there's a will, there's a way, and I'd make some sort of plan," said one Bulawayo clothing manufacturer who, like most people, refused to be identified for fear of retaliation by the government. "Now I'm not so sure. I think there's a real collapse coming."The middle class traditionally don't give a monkeys how badly their nation's underclass are treated but, now that Mugabe's tactics are starting to effect their lifestyles, it might not be too long before Mugabe starts to feel the heat of a protest that he won't be able to put down as brutally as he has in the villages.
"Considerations of color have begun to blur very much," said one Bulawayo doctor whose average patient is a white business manager. "White people will tell you, a little embarrassed and shy, that they're eating nothing but sadza," or corn meal porridge, the doctor said. "They've been reduced to the diet of the rural poor."And what is the Zimbabwean government's reaction to the fact that the shelves are empty in the supermarkets? Why, more threats, of course.
"We are at war. We will not allow shelves to be empty," one of Mugabe's vice presidents, Joseph Msika, said in a July 18 speech.
Perhaps I am some kind of insane optimist, but I keep feeling that Mugabe's government simply has to fall. He's got away with acting in the most tyrannical manner, backed and apologised for by the shameful Mbeki, but surely he has now - by causing such hardship to even the middle class - simply gone too far.Since then, gangs of price inspectors have patrolled shops and factories, imposing sometimes-arbitrary price reductions, and as many as 4,000 businesspeople have been arrested, fined or jailed. State-run newspapers publish lists of telephone numbers on their front pages daily, exhorting citizens to report merchants whose prices exceed dictates.
Ordinary citizens initially greeted the price cuts with a euphoric - and short-lived - shopping spree. However, merchants and the government's many critics say that much of the cut-rate merchandise has not been snapped up by ordinary citizens, but by the police, soldiers and members of Mugabe's ruling party who have been tipped off to the price inspectors' rounds.
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